Saturday, October 22, 2016

Nightmare

This 1963 issue of "Casper and Nightmare The Galloping Ghost" may not be exactly Halloween-themed, but hey... Ghosts.

It always bothered me a little that none of the undead wore clothes in Casper's world. They have hair ribbons and bowler derby hats, but not clothes. So are clothes available in the afterlife, but no one chooses to wear them aside from a few accessories? I'm not sure I'm prepared for that.

These text-only stories in comics hearkens back to the early days of comic books when in order to meet the U.S. Postal Service's magazine mailing rate, a magazine had to contain a certain percentage of text. Comic book legend Stan Lee started out writing these filler stories as a teenager at Timely Comics (Marvel's predecessor) under the pseudonym "Neel Nats" ("Stan Lee backwards...kinda). Using a pseudonym was a common practice for comic book writers who were saving their real names for serious work. The fact that Stan Lee is already a pseudonym for "Stanley Lieber" indicates Stan was even saving his pseudonym for greater things. Or Timely was trying to make it look like they had a bigger writing staff than they did.

Stories like this next one indicates the writers of Casper were on the forefront of '60's mind-altering drug set.